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Educ Psychol Rev (2014) 26:191195
DOI 10.1007/s10648-014-9263-5
REVIEW ARTICLE
Fred Paas & Paul Ayres
Published online: 29 March 2014# Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014
Abstract According to cognitive load theory (CLT), the limitations of working memory (WM) in the learning of new tasks together with its ability to cooperate with an unlimited long-term memory (LTM) for familiar tasks enable human beings to deal effectively with complex problems and acquire highly complex knowledge and skills. With regard to WM, CLT has focused to a large extent on learning task characteristics, and to a lesser extent on learner characteristics to manage WM load and optimize learning through instructional design. With regard to LTM, explanations of human learning and cognition have mainly focused on domain-general skills, instead of domain-specific knowledge held in LTM. The contributions to this special issue provide a broader cognitive load view on the role of memory in learning and education by presenting the historical roots and conceptual development of the concept of WM, as well as the theoretical and practical implications of current debates about WM mechanisms (Cowan 2014), by presenting an updated model of cognitive load in which the physical learning environment is considered a distinct causal factor for WM load (Choi et al. 2014), by an experimental demonstration of the effects of persistent pain on the available WM resources for learning (Smith and Ayres 2014), and by using aspects of evolutionary educational psychology to argue for the primacy of domain-specific knowledge in human cognition (Tricot and Sweller 2014).
Keywords Cognitiveloadtheory.Workingmemory.Learning.Education.Instructionaldesign
The importance of the role that working memory (WM) and long-term memory (LTM) play in human learning is undisputed. Cognitive load theory (Paas et al. 2003; Sweller et al. 1998, 2011) uses a cognitive architecture consisting of a WM that is limited in capacity to 41 elements of information (Cowan 2001; Baddeley 1986; Miller 1956) and duration to about 30 s (Cowan 1988; Peterson and Peterson 1959) when dealing with novel information. The capacity and duration limits of WM are eliminated when it deals with familiar information that
F. Paas (*)
Institute of Psychology, Erasmus University Rotterdam, P.O. Box 1738, 3000 DRRotterdam, The Netherlandse-mail: [email protected]
F. Paas
Early Start Research Institute, University of Wollongong, Wollongong, Australia
P. Ayres
School of Education,...